Incessantly snuffling about - a dogot update

I love it that she takes me out walking at night (or very late evening, depending on the hours you keep) particularly now that it's not getting dark anymore (although, as I said, we're still getting stars, so it's nowhere near as light as it can - and will - get. The other night I checked my claim and at twenty-five minutes to midnight I could count three stars, and forty-five minutes later I could make out all of the Big Dipper, but it's a blue darkness, not a black one, and when you get away from the street lights you realise you can see perfectly well without them - better, even, or certainly better further. Darker than dusk, lighter than darkness). Of course I loved her taking me out on wintry nights as well, but that's right beside the point at the moment and seems to belong to a different life, because right now we plunge ourselves into the night of light darkness, together, and because it's late and there are few, if any, people about and I trust her, I will let her off the leash so she can explore the night. The smells of the kevätkesän yö, spring-summer night are heady in her nose, in both our noses, actually (and yes, we have words for the between-seasons times of the year - kevätkesä, syyskesä, syystalvi, kevättalvi. It's very useful). She will leap and run and roll on the grass a little, but what she loves most is following her nose, unravelling the spaghetti of scents which evidently wiggle along the ground, her chunky-ish bottom swinging amusingly from side to side as she trots along, all determined and purposeful, in concentric circles and spirals, with sudden twirls and turns and steps back, and all the while I hear her snifi-snifi-snifi-FHRHRFF, the latter being the huff of her outbreath with which, I fancy, she empties her nose of the scents she's gathered, to make space for more. She can go on like this forever, it seems, and all I can hear is her and the nightingales (there are at least three in the neighbourhood), because I am good at blocking out the drone-hum of the motorway a mile or so off, and it's anyway not all that busy at this hour, and I love her and am, like her, loving the night and its smells (although I prefer the bird cherry blossoms, the grass, the nettles, the fir trees, to the hares' and rabbits' tracks which she is so drawn to and I can't detect, and I'm so not letting on that I too wander around with a snifi-snifi-FHRHF nose-noise).

This post is about everything. And love.

I started this blog about two years ago. Happy Birthday, blog girl. It is quite safe to say a fair amount has happened in these two years - when I started blogging, I was married in the tropics, now I am divorcing in the Arctic (okay, near enough, and it sounds good).

Now before y'all hasten to lace your congratulations with commiserations I will categorically state that this is not a miserable state of affairs, at all. Being a divorcee in the Arctic clearly suits me, is much more right for me than the other option, because I am if not happy (for what, pray, is happiness, and do people seriously expect to achieve it as a permanent state of affairs?) at the very least the shape of my life is a shape that fits, if you see what I mean.

(I am here reminded of several lines from some Finnish poets - names forgotten, sorry. One says something to the effect of "Life is given to you so you can decide what position you'd like to be dead in", another "Life is made that way so you wouldn't long to come back too quickly", and a third states that "Just as the visitor starts to feel at ease, it is time to leave." The last is a bit startling, because I am rather feeling at ease in my life - even with the pain. The pain, in fact, is okay, has been okay for quite some time, it's the sticky immobility horror that is still bad to cope with. Time to shut up in these brackets.)

So yes. My life is a shape that fits, and it's surprising to me, really, how difficult it's been getting here - although to be fair there have been times before now when my life has fitted me okay and I've given it up, either through choice or necessity. I have clutched various instructions and users' manuals on life in my time - and I'd bet I'm not the only one. They tend to state very standard guidelines, though - if you're from a cold country with miserable weather, fantasise about warmer climes, please, if you're single, hope for a relationship. And so on.

I don't mean to sound miserable or embittered here. For I'm not, gentle Reader, most emphatically. Spring has returned, bringing with it birdsong (the other night when I was on my way to the sauna, the blackbird gave me a single and piercingly lovely wolf-whistle. I interpreted that as A Very Good Sign (hello, sis). Put a spring in my step, I can tell you that for free), things that grow, and light - all good things I appreciate greatly (nothing wrong with seasonal change, though, and autumn and death-moon and all that are fine too when their time comes). But there is a certain unnameable something, a wistfulness that the return of spring stirs up in me. Particularly, I suppose, the light, that unreal light of Northern summers which seems to glow from the inside, more and more the later it gets. The further into spring and summer we get, the lighter the light becomes, in both meanings of the word, a weightless other-worldly light which makes you feel like something will come, some redemption, darkness and death are no more, Heaven will surely come unto the earth, and the feeling builds up and builds up with the light, and I can't help myself, can't help my body and soul responding to it and believing the feeling, even though this is my forty-first spring (although only my thirty-first of these my native white springs of such painful beauty. As it is, existence owes me ten more springs, wouldn't you agree? And so, once I'm dead, I will come back for ten more springs. Yes). But alas, maybe it is my age, maybe it is my nature, but while I allow myself, once more, to believe it, can't help but believe it, once again, one more time, I also know it's not going to happen, it will build up and build up and never peak, for just as you think it will, it turns and though it is still lovely it is already descending. I tried to explain this the other night to someone who, miraculously, seemed to get me despite the garblational pig's ear I made of it.

So yes. This blog is two years old, and - probably rather by coincidence than by planning - it has had a fine birthday present from the one-and-only Montag (whom, incidentally, I urge you all to visit. He cares about stuff, and is poignant, funny, angry, amongst other things, sometimes alternately, sometimes concurrently, so there's something for everyone over at his house). Although he is stupefyingly prolific on his "main" site, Montag also has another site where he posts a poem a week, because he fasts and writes poems weekly, for peace. And the present for my blog girl, gentle Reader, was a poem, dedicated to yours truly and my sisters. This is a special and fine thing and one I cannot hope to match, so I'll just say thank you again, Montag, and here - have some trees. I believe you have a liking for them.




(So, if you got this far, gentle Reader, thank you for bearing with me. To all those who have gone on at me about putting up a new post, you've only yourselves to blame (love you really). I feel it may well be I'm pretty much written out for a good long while to come. But another anniversary is also approaching, so I may have to return before too long for a few words on the Second Coming.)

I will have a December post if it kills me

Some while back, I noted I had written no posts at all in December, last year. In fact, I was, at the time, having a blogging crisis (I am fond of the artistic licence to exaggerate) during which I came very, very close to giving it up altogether. Oh, thank God I didn't, because it would have been unthinkable...but I note I have not exactly been particularly wordy recently either. This is, of course, to do with the climate and the weather and the darkness - location, location, location, in other words, dear Reader. Living a stone's throw from the North Pole has its lighter and its darker sides, and currently, we are going through the latter. It has a strange, flattening effect on one's writing (at least this is as convenient an excuse as any I'm likely to come up with before December's done again, and I still don't have a December post to my name). Weirdly enough, the darkness does lend itself to some lovely photography (excuse me while I blow my own trumpet).
These pictures, dear Reader, are from my balcony, and depict not the constellations above me (a chance to see them would be a fine thing in current prevailing weather conditions) but a very wet type of sleet falling.
I am so fond of these photos (I took a couple a few weeks or so ago, when we first had a light dusting of sleet) that I have already got several up on my flickr site, and I'm too embarrassed to flood more and more of the same thing there (don't ask me why - it is as much my site as this one, so I should be allowed to do whatever dorky thing I like there. Mostly, I do, too, but for some reason, these (oh God) artsier efforts make me feel shy). Which is why I am treating you, dear Reader, to them, here on my bloggy. Here, have another one (sorry, but I do like them an awful lot).

And because I do like you, too, an awful lot, although I've been neglecting to say much, here's one more showing my downwards view as well as the galaxies of snow. I think it has a distinct stage-lit feeling to it. The blogger enters, upstage left...she is going home.

How to tell the season has turned

There's no doubt about it - the stars have come back. The white nights are over.

This is for you, dammit

I don't know. There I was, committing an act of great altruism and love, and what do I get in return? Petty quibbling on whether the Republic of Ireland can actually be considered a part of The British Isles or not.

Now don't get me wrong. I am not some uneducated twirp who thinks England is the name of all the countries thataway, forrin geerrl as I may be. I am speaking purely geographically - not geopolitically - when I claim that The British Isles is the name of that island group. To me, this smacks of the reluctance of the Canadians to be known as North Americans - which is, of course, abject nonsense, because they just are, ok?

Anyhow. Just in case this matter needs any clarification, I sent my beautiful, 22-hours-a-day Finnish sun over to comfort a weather-violated friend in the Republic of Ireland. You had better be nicer about it after this clarification, as I am wondering whether such a magnanimous act was altogether wise - it has gone down to + 16 here and it is absolutely pissing down (my summer holiday starts in two days).

For good measure, I'll send another sun. The first one can be for the weather-beaten friend who is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, not only in The British Isles, but also in Great Britain. So there.

This is for you

One or two of my dear people have been suffering terribly from the recent weather conditions to mistreat the British Isles. In an attempt to offer them some comfort, I am now sending them the Finnish sun, with an added feature of the auringonsilta, the sun's bridge - that's what we call the reflection of the sun on the water.

There you go. Hope it helps.

Today's fleeting thoughts and impressions

When spring rain falls on the dusty tarmac streets of this city, the city of my birth, a very particular smell is released. I can't compare it to anything - it is both dusty and fresh, not at all unpleasant. It triggers memories in me older than words. It proves, in a way, that I am indeed in the city of my birth - these are the streets I have learned to walk on, inhaling this smell.

I went to pick up a parcel from the post office local to my home (from which I am a plumbing-renovations exile until the autumn). Sent from the other side of the planet, I knew the parcel contained photographs from my childhood and that of my teenage sons. The weight of the parcel on my hip felt a little like carrying a baby, but also I felt I was carrying mad sad Solange, the unloved-till-breaking-point theatrical character I am currently playing. Three more shows as Solange, then I, too, shall leave her. Sorry Solange... It is strange how the characters one plays become real, at once part of oneself, and another person intimately known, and yet all of it is illusion.

While I walked, I got a sudden urge to listen to my scarcely-used iPod. I played my friend Rebecca's song on repeat, over and over again. It is beautiful - I remember when she played it to me for the first time, I knew she was a singer-songwriter but I had no idea of how shockingly talented she was. It completely blew me away then, and still does. Dear Reader, these are your instructions - go and listen to her singing "Isadora's Alice Party" - the other songs are good too, but Isadora is very special. Listen to it and imagine the scent of the spring rain.

By the end of this post, you will owe me an Easter egg

It is Palm Sunday. (It is also April Fool's Day, but you only have seven minutes to fool me - it has to be done before midday, you know.)

An old tradition from Eastern Finland, revived in recent years, has children dressing up as Easter witches, ringing doorbells (I am badly prepared so shall have to hide if someone rings mine) or going to their relatives, and, bearing a decorated willow branch which the victim is lightly smacked with, chanting the following:

Virvon varvon
tuoreeks terveeks
tulevaks vuodeks
vitsa sulle
palkka mulle.

The decorated willow branch is then given to the victim, who gives the child an Easter egg. (Traditionally, the wee virpoja would have to wait for it and come back on Easter Sunday to claim his reward, but our era is not very big on pleasure delaying.)

So you see, dear reader, I have tricked you. I am big on keeping traditions intact, and ok with pleasure delaying. Therefore, I shall not expect my Easter egg from you until next Sunday.

It's all my fault -

I did say the season had turned without knocking on wood. See these two pictures?
This one from last night


this one from this morning


both from my balcony.

Yeees. Those odd little balls are snow. Spring has gone and fucked off, or painunut v*t*uun, as we say around here (although, in our defence, possibly not usually in this context). At least it's silenced the bloody birds (well not really even that, there was at least one die-hard shouting ti-tyy with all his might when I walked to the shops).

I haven't posted this thing just to bemoan the return, with vengeance, of the cold white stuff. No. I am humbly requesting you all take a look at my sadly-neglected, oft-ignored photoblog, because if you don't, nobody will, and think how sad it's feeling, stuck there in the ether of the world wide web, all on its lonesome.

Just for the record - you can always blame his highness the Political Umpire for reminding me about my photoblog. I would, naturally, never stoop so low as to gratuitously advertise my own crap site, would I?

Today's mantra: ti-tyy, ti-tyy, ti-tyy

Om om om

Spring.

Spring spring spring spring spring spring spring.

Spring. Spring. Spring.

Spring.

Om om om

The incredible fact is the season's turned, and lucky I, on the tenth floor, I don't just have a view. I have a soundscape, too: the birds have started their spring-time spouse-finding. The talitiainen (literally, lard tit, but better known in the English-speaking world as a great tit) is our first harbinger of spring. His much-quoted love call used to be ti-ti-tyy, but particularly in urban areas, this is nowadays trunkated into ti-tyy. Like human babies, baby lard tits learn their vocabulary from their parents, and during my lifetime the wall of sound from traffic has grown to such a magnitude the baby talitiainen can't hear the first "ti". I was shocked to find the English think he says "teacher, teacher". No, no, no. Ti-tyy, ti-tyy is what we now hear.

I have also heard a peipponen, the fellow elsewhere known as a chaffinch (he says tiritiriteijaa, this proven by a popular old children's song). This is headline news, since, as everyone knows

Kuu kiurusta kesään
puoli kuuta peipposesta
västäräkistä vähäsen
pääskysestä ei päivääkään.

(NB I don't make this stuff up, this is an ancient Finnish rhyme which utilises the arrival of certain migratory birds to predict the beginning of summer:

A month till summer from the song thrush,
half a month from a chaffinch,
a little bit from a wagtail (sorry folks, you'll have to make do with the Finnish Wikipedia here as the English version illustrates the wrong subspecies altogether),
not a day from the swallow.)

I heard Mr. Peipponen last Sunday and nearly fell off the balcony. Half a month, and we're only in mid-March now! (Incidentally, hope you all bewore the Ides of March yesterday, was meaning to post an online warning, but the day ended before I got round to it.)

I also managed to catch Mr. Country Bumpkin Great Tit saying not only ti-ti-tyy but also adding the odd extra -tyy, for good measure, as it were, just to prove he could. I was so happy, he sounded like my childhood spring. Mr Tit, I said to myself, a lovely spring to you too, and best of luck with the lady lard tits.

Tonight,

what started out as rain has turned into a very solid form of Slush Puppy. Kevät keikkuen tulevi, spring comes a-rocking, as they so aptly say in these parts. I am so very glad I went into the shoe shop today, lured by the promise of 70% discount on winter shoes, and bought myself a pair of fully waterproof goretex wonders, although they are not my thing at all and I have already bought the pig-ugly pair this week. I worked a veritable miracle on my ruined boots as well today, using the various ointments I bought, and topping it off with a scary spray that describes itsef as "Nano-Powered High Performance Waterproof Wet Blocker". Not just any waterproof wet blocker, you will note, but nano-powered. I am experiencing nanotechnology, or shall be, when it (the weather) dries up again and I dare to wear my lovely boots.

My cousin came over to dinner tonight. She recently finished her thesis (incidentally, on the very worthy topic of "The Uses of Grotesque in Tom Waits' Lyrics", she is lovely and I am proud of her), but instead of being all elated, she of course confessed to the well-known phenomenon of having gone all post-thesically depressed. - Slave ceaselessly forever over what you want to achieve; achieve it, and lose all sense of meaning or direction. There is something about the human condition there, something central.

Down she came with a thumpety-thump

After my post-spiritual-experience heightened state over the weekend, I am back to the planet:

LIST OF GRIPES
Our -20 C conditions rapidly mutated into +1 C which resulted in me ruining my lovely boots which cost a bomb (bought in September with birthday money), so had to spend 59 euros on a crap-ugly all-weather pair (incl. assortment of gunks in pots to attempt a rescue on the lovely pair)
Fledgling sniffly head cold which has failed to break for a week, and which I thought gone, was back with niggling vengeance today, leaving me cranky and under the weather but not sufficiently to warrant someone with a Lutheran work ethic (me) to stay in bed and sleep it off
Came home tired, with over-full calendar duties to be fulfilled, to find the LIFT OUT OF ORDER (10th floor is my abode, as you may recall). "WE APOLOGISE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE, AND WILL DO OUR BEST TO ENSURE REPAIR OF LIFT IN NEAR FUTURE" aargh, v---u

Still, it is maaliskuu, pearl moon is over, lovely as it was, and now we are only a fortnight off from the equinox. There is more and more light, and before you know it, we will be the envy of the sane world with our endless hours of sun.

A note: the painfully beautiful brevity of the Finnish summer (when it's at its best, it's about to end - think on that as a motto for our lives in general), combined with the atrocities of the between-seasons months, reflects in the national character - well, mine anyway - some Finns may actually consider themselves jolly Scandinavians. I am no such thing, I am all Sami-Slavic. Beauty is melancholia, melancholia is beauty.

Shrove Sunday, anyone?

I don't think it exists in the English-speaking world - and even Shrove Tuesday is probably better known as Pancake Day. However, in Finland we are lucky enough to have both a Sunday and a Tuesday dedicated to sledding and eating a special baked good filled with whipped cream and strawberry jam and/or marzipan. Laskiainen is the name of the day. Clicking on the link will allow you to see what it's all about:

"Holy shit I'm gonna die heeheehee"

Finally

Who knows, maybe winters are something we are going to lose. I am certainly appreciative of having even a taste of one this year. I made a snow lantern on my balcony.

2007

I am so bored with the internet.

I would rather knit the dog's vomit jumper any day (second sleeve 2/3 way through, so we're getting there), or curl up with a good book. Or even a crap one.

Happy New Year all the same.

On my second hemisphere

Grab a look at "my other hemisphere", the lower one of the globes pictured on this blog, the one featuring Finland, at about this time of day (elevenish am). You can clearly see that darkness has only just lifted, but is looming large again, only just round the corner.

It'll still get worse for a month. If only we had snow.

I am so thoroughly boring, harping on about the weather and the darkness. But it is such a central aspect of my life this time of year. And I wouldn't mind so much, if I could cuddle up in bed and only get up if and when the mood should grab me. We are clearly meant to hibernate, like Moomins. I am, anyway.

Slow moving

For five days, I have been trying to move into a place of my own, after six months spent in my parents' tiny two-bedroom flat with three generations crowded together. At least I have a place to move into, and this month's rent is - near-miraculously - paid, but considering how little stuff I have left after last year's throw&give-everything-away-before-moving-to-the-other-side-of-the-globe extravaganza, it is proving quite a job to complete the move. On Thursday, my mother and I drove to the mökki (summer cottage) to fetch my crockery, some lamps, and other sundries. The weather was gloriously wintry - snow on the ground, frost on the trees, a haze in the air and the sun shining through it. (Giddy with photographic anticipation I shot away on the Pentax, until I realised I had forgotten the damn memory card in the reader. The camera's internal memory will only hold seven shots, and I don't have the technical know-how to get them out of the internal memory anyway) (yes you may laugh at me). We couldn't drive all the way to the mökki, as I worried about the car sinking into the snow and us being stuck in the middle of nowhere. We had to leave it at the nearest "bigger" road and walk the last two-three hundred metres, which is fully ok, except when loading the car with stuff. We packed my kitchenware into boxes and pulled them to the car on sleds. It took as four or five round trips with the sleds to get the stuff loaded. I was peeved all day about the camera and my lost photos.

Weather report, once again

Finns are at least as bad at harping on about the weather as the Brits. I was going to have a real go at it yesterday, here on my blog. I was planning on describing the condition known as räntäsade. The best translation I suppose is sleet, although it doesn't come close to conveying the misery of the air around you turning into a vertical slotted-sea of pound-coin-sized (and as heavy) shplats of matter, with the consistency of unflavoured slush-puppy, driven into you at 20 m/s. Happily, we were rehearsing again last night, so I ran out of time.

Today, right now, it has turned into snow! Ok, so it will be equally wet and miserable once I actually get out in it, and the public transport will slip and slide, and I don't have the shoes for wet weather, but I can't help myself. Looking directly up at the sky during snowfall, the flakes dancing against that particular hue of bluey-grey snowfall-clouds are, always makes me feel like a little girl in the nicest, most exciting and exhilarating way. I am off to make some snowballs & get my gloves wet...

Seasonally affected

The lack of daylight is becoming more and more severe, and will get worse for weeks still. In fact, we would not yet even fully suffer if it wasn't for the sodding rain. As it is, the city has turned into John Major's LSD trip - you know, "oh, how many shades of grey". I feel the lack of light as a physical sensation, like thirst, like hunger, like a headache. You notice it most when, for some reason, you do get a glimpse of light, like this morning, when it didn't rain for almost an hour or so. We do pay dearly for our white nights.

Glum-and-gloom moon

There is nothing quite as grey as Helsinki in October. Unless it is Helsinki in November, although November does tend to go more towards the brown scale, which is possibly even more miserable. I used to like to play the Tom Waits song "November" (badly, I am afraid) on the piano this time of the year, but now all my music is in Hawai'i.

Months are called moons in Finnish, kuu. October is lokakuu, loka being the brown, muddy water you would find in, say, a deep ditch in October, after weeks of rain. Ditchwater moon is a very apt name. November is marraskuu, marras being archaic Finnish for death. Death moon is even apter.

There are some nice "moons", too: January is tammikuu, oak moon. My favouritely-named (if that is a word) is February: helmikuu, pearl moon. But right now, we are in puddle-water moon, and it is bringing out the melancholic introvert in me.